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I don't know anything about motorcycles. I wouldn't trust Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking up the original Japanese (and translation

I don't know anything about motorcycles. I wouldn't trust Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking up the original Japanese (and translation notes, etc) for anime and other works to figure out what in the heck went wrong with the translation because Japanese culture has all these honorifics that English lacks and that goes weird places, along with the gender neutral pronouns, among other things. If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you.

superfrank 6y ago
I agree with you about Google translate not being perfect. I actually wrote most of my comment up before running it through translate. Even without the text, none of those pictures seem especially deep, so even taking the text out of the equation, I still stand by my comment. That being said, this is the Google translation of the tweet in the article: Minasan ٩ (ˆoˆ) ۶ Do you have a motorcycle? Spring is coming soon Age: Showa ○○○ Height: 166 Living: Ibaraki I love: messing around with bikes Like I said in my last comment, I know Google translate is far from perfect and I'm very open to being proven wrong, but I have a hard time believing that there's some deep insight in this post when that is what Google translate put put out. The translation seems pretty "influencer" to me.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I've been up all night and I feel awful and I'm not trying to pick a fight here. I'm just thinking of some novel I read where some nouveau riche fool paid someone for their riding boots because his were too new looking and he wanted to look like he had been riding a long time. He wanted worn-looking boots. He didn't want to look like it was his first time. And the guy took his money with a straight face and sold him the boots even though the color of the boots signaled he was a trainer or something, which is something the nouveau riche guy had no way of knowing. But it would have been immediately laughable to most people who were in the know. I am not going to go through the account and try to make up BS, but the bike may be custom built, the gear he's wearing may be amazingly good, the locations he is posting from may be something incredibly special in some way and not commenting on those details may be part of the appeal. I'm a writer by trade and I get paid by the word and also have to meet other constraints and you can sometimes say very little with three paragraphs or you can say a metric fuck ton with a few well-chosen words. I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular. A density of quality info and yadda is often some element of that and that is often not obvious to outsiders who cannot readily tell that this photo is some superficial tripe and that seemingly similar one is worlds apart in quality, data, informativeness, whatever. Anyway: This is my insomnia talking. It is absolutely not intended to be ugly or pick a fight or yadda. You have a great day/night/whatever.
  - antonvs 6y ago
    > The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular. A dogwhistle, basically? "Dog whistles use language which appears normal to the majority, but which communicate specific things to intended audiences." Dogwhistles are most often associated with politics, but the idea goes beyond that (unless you classify all asymmetric/broadcasted communication as political, which is not without merit.)
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      Eh, more like subtext for things people aren't necessarily consciously aware of.
      - sam1r 6y ago
        Which is why I believe the best you can do is stay aware of the present at a meta level, and track things as a function of time. Of course all of this requires self-drive and personal determination / willingness.
  - superfrank 6y ago
    The original comment I was replying to was claiming that the account might have been successful because it presented the wisdom of a 50 year old with the face of a 20 year old. All the examples you gave are totally possible. There may be something about the bike or the locations being visited that are special, I really don't know. Even if that is the case, that's not really what OP was claiming and not really what I was responding to. There are tons of little reasons this account could be popular, but based on the little research I did, I don't think it's because "she" is making posts full of wisdom, years beyond "her" age.
  - sam1r 6y ago
    >>> I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular ^^ this Thank you. Wish I could pay you per word for this. Hmu@samir.ist
csa 6y ago
> If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you. I know bikes, I know Japanese, and I lived and road in Japan. The translation is largely accurate (just minor structural stuff that doesn’t matter). The only content that might matter, and it doesn’t really seem to, are the hashtags for the tweet that were not covered above (roughly “connect with bikers” and “quick biker self-intro”). While I agree with your general characterization of Google translate when dealing with Japanese content, in this case it did a decent job, largely because the content was very simple and straightforward.
- csa 6y ago
  I can’t edit my reply, but I just realized another comment i made might be what you mean in terms of something “being lost” on someone who is using Google translate. Specifically, even though “Showa ??” was translated accurately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone knows what it means (born before Jan 89, that is, the Showa era). If so, good point!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
astrange 6y ago
> I wouldn't trust Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking up the original Japanese (and translation notes, etc) for anime and other works to figure out what in the heck went wrong with the translation These are meaningless differences that only people who don't speak Japanese notice. Because once you do, you'd know that the text being in English instead of Japanese is already such a large difference that picking at individual words doesn't mean anything. (And honorifics definitely don't mean much. Even if you "leave them in" for "correctness", that actually means leaving in the ones the kids know and taking out the ones they don't.) Actually one of the translators for a lot of popular works recently left Twitter because kids kept harassing him because he was "wrong" because the official work didn't match rumors they'd started based on their incorrect Japanese knowledge. Hope he's not doing that.

superfrank 6y ago

I agree with you about Google translate not being perfect. I actually wrote most of my comment up before running it through translate. Even without the text, none of those pictures seem especially deep, so even taking the text out of the equation, I still stand by my comment. That being said, this is the Google translation of the tweet in the article: Minasan ٩ (ˆoˆ) ۶ Do you have a motorcycle? Spring is coming soon Age: Showa ○○○ Height: 166 Living: Ibaraki I love: messing around with bikes Like I said in my last comment, I know Google translate is far from perfect and I'm very open to being proven wrong, but I have a hard time believing that there's some deep insight in this post when that is what Google translate put put out. The translation seems pretty "influencer" to me.

DoreenMichele 6y ago
I've been up all night and I feel awful and I'm not trying to pick a fight here. I'm just thinking of some novel I read where some nouveau riche fool paid someone for their riding boots because his were too new looking and he wanted to look like he had been riding a long time. He wanted worn-looking boots. He didn't want to look like it was his first time. And the guy took his money with a straight face and sold him the boots even though the color of the boots signaled he was a trainer or something, which is something the nouveau riche guy had no way of knowing. But it would have been immediately laughable to most people who were in the know. I am not going to go through the account and try to make up BS, but the bike may be custom built, the gear he's wearing may be amazingly good, the locations he is posting from may be something incredibly special in some way and not commenting on those details may be part of the appeal. I'm a writer by trade and I get paid by the word and also have to meet other constraints and you can sometimes say very little with three paragraphs or you can say a metric fuck ton with a few well-chosen words. I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular. A density of quality info and yadda is often some element of that and that is often not obvious to outsiders who cannot readily tell that this photo is some superficial tripe and that seemingly similar one is worlds apart in quality, data, informativeness, whatever. Anyway: This is my insomnia talking. It is absolutely not intended to be ugly or pick a fight or yadda. You have a great day/night/whatever.
- antonvs 6y ago
  > The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular. A dogwhistle, basically? "Dog whistles use language which appears normal to the majority, but which communicate specific things to intended audiences." Dogwhistles are most often associated with politics, but the idea goes beyond that (unless you classify all asymmetric/broadcasted communication as political, which is not without merit.)
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    Eh, more like subtext for things people aren't necessarily consciously aware of.
    - sam1r 6y ago
      Which is why I believe the best you can do is stay aware of the present at a meta level, and track things as a function of time. Of course all of this requires self-drive and personal determination / willingness.
- superfrank 6y ago
  The original comment I was replying to was claiming that the account might have been successful because it presented the wisdom of a 50 year old with the face of a 20 year old. All the examples you gave are totally possible. There may be something about the bike or the locations being visited that are special, I really don't know. Even if that is the case, that's not really what OP was claiming and not really what I was responding to. There are tons of little reasons this account could be popular, but based on the little research I did, I don't think it's because "she" is making posts full of wisdom, years beyond "her" age.
- sam1r 6y ago
  >>> I absolutely don't know enough about the topic. I just know that when things get popular, it is often due to some value-added detail that no one explicitly talks about. The fact that it gets slipped in and not commented on is part of what makes some things wildly popular ^^ this Thank you. Wish I could pay you per word for this. Hmu@samir.ist

csa 6y ago

> If you know nothing of the language, culture, motorcycles, motorcycle gear, etc, I am going to guess there are a lot of really important details that are utterly lost on you. I know bikes, I know Japanese, and I lived and road in Japan. The translation is largely accurate (just minor structural stuff that doesn’t matter). The only content that might matter, and it doesn’t really seem to, are the hashtags for the tweet that were not covered above (roughly “connect with bikers” and “quick biker self-intro”). While I agree with your general characterization of Google translate when dealing with Japanese content, in this case it did a decent job, largely because the content was very simple and straightforward.

csa 6y ago
I can’t edit my reply, but I just realized another comment i made might be what you mean in terms of something “being lost” on someone who is using Google translate. Specifically, even though “Showa ??” was translated accurately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that someone knows what it means (born before Jan 89, that is, the Showa era). If so, good point!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

astrange 6y ago

> I wouldn't trust Google translate because one of my son's hobbies is looking up the original Japanese (and translation notes, etc) for anime and other works to figure out what in the heck went wrong with the translation These are meaningless differences that only people who don't speak Japanese notice. Because once you do, you'd know that the text being in English instead of Japanese is already such a large difference that picking at individual words doesn't mean anything. (And honorifics definitely don't mean much. Even if you "leave them in" for "correctness", that actually means leaving in the ones the kids know and taking out the ones they don't.) Actually one of the translators for a lot of popular works recently left Twitter because kids kept harassing him because he was "wrong" because the official work didn't match rumors they'd started based on their incorrect Japanese knowledge. Hope he's not doing that.